
RCISES IN SANDERS THEATRE 

CAMBRIDGE, MASS., UNDER THE AUSPICES 

OF THE CAMBRIDGE HISTORICAL SOCIETY 

CELEBRATING THE ONE HUNDREDTH 

ANNIVERSARY OF THE BIRTH OF 

RICHARD HENRY DANA 



I 



OCTOBER 20, 1915 



I 







CAMBRIDGE 
1916 






Otz^t^d 



1815-1882 




EXERCISES IN SANDERS THEATRE 

CAMBRIDGE, MASS., UNDER THE AUSPICES 

OF THE CAMBRIDGE HISTORICAL SOCIETY 

CELEBRATING THE ONE HUNDREDTH 

ANNIVERSARY OF THE BIRTH OF 

RICHARD HENRY DANA 



OCTOBER 20, 1915 




CAMBRIDGE 
1916 



v^°^ 



y<yQp 



Printed in advance from Volume X op the Publications of the 
Cambridge Historical Society 



'^ PROCEEDINGS 

OF 

THE CAMBRIDGE HISTORICAL SOCIETY 



DANA CENTENARY 

A SPECIAL public meeting^ of the Cambridge Histori- 
cal Society was held in Sanders Theatre on Wednes- 
day, October 20, 1915, at eight o'clock in the evening, to 
celebrate the one hundredth anniversary of the birth of 
Richard Henry Dana. 

The order of exercises was as follows : 

Introductory Eemarks Et. Eev. William Lawrence 

Dana as a Man of Letters Professor Bliss Perry 

Dana as an Antislavery Leader . . . Moorfield Storey, Esq. 
Dana as a Lawyer and Citizen . . . Hon. Joseph H. Choate 

The Rt. Rev. William Lawrence, Bishop of Massachu- 
setts, presided. 

INTRODUCTORY REMARKS 

Bishop Lawrence 

Fellow Citizens: 

We have met this evening to recognize the centenary of 
Richard Henry Dana. Can any of us recall a similar meet- 

1 In connection with this meeting there was given, in the Treasure Room 
of the Harvard College Library, during the week of October 14-21, an exhi- 
bition of books, manuscripts, portraits, and objects of personal or historic 
interest relating to Mr. Dana. This exhibition was open to the pubUc without 
charge. See Appendix. 



4 THE CAMBRIDGE HISTORICAL SOCIETY [Oct. 

ing held in memory of one who was a private citizen and who 
in his day was not the object of popular applause ? Indeed, 
though a citizen of public spirit and rare devotion to the 
State, he was defeated in political life and rejected by the 
Senate for an exalted appointment ; though a man of great 
ability, he did not meet with the success that his earlier 
years promised. 

The fact that Mr. Dana's fellow citizens meet one hundred 
years after his birth to recall his life suggests that he had 
qualities which are not tested by popular conceptions of 
success, that he had elements of genius, ideals, and habits of 
thought which touch the deeper sentiment of mankind in such 
a way as to make his influence more permanent than that of 
the men of his time who were conspicuously successful. 

It is that we may recall these ideals and characteris- 
tics that we are met to-night. As presiding officer, it is 
for me to do little more than introduce the speakers. I 
may, however, be pardoned for saying a few introductory 
words. 

Mr. Dana came of the best and most characteristic New 
England stock, and he took great satisfaction in that fact. 
In temperament and ideals he was true to his stock. First, 
the spirit of liberty and of the equal rights of men before 
the law were so wrought into the fabric of his character that 
his soul was afire at any invasion of this principle. When, 
therefore, a despised black man was about to be carried into 
bondage, Mr. Dana stood by his side in his defense as natu- 
rally as if he had sprung to the defense of his own brother. 
Again, in his law practice the question of the amount in- 
volved or the fee to be received had no interest for him ; and 
his sense of duty was such that he never failed to serve the 
humblest with the best of his time and thought. This imagi- 
nation and love of liberty compelled him to press out into 
the field of international relations in the hope that there 



I 



1915.] INTRODUCTORY REMARKS 5 

might be built up a system of international comity and 
justice, which since his day has grown in strength and has 
won favoring sentiment throughout the world, but which 
during the past year has been rudely shaken. 

Every boy born upon the coast of Massachusetts has in 
him the fever for salt air and the sea. Hence when in youth 
he was compelled to leave home on account of trouble with 
his eyes, he turned instinctively to the sea, and he wrote a 
narrative which in its simplicity and directness of expression 
was a fresh product of literature and has become an English 
classic. 

Deeper than any other moving force in the New England 
character has been the mystic power of religious faith. 
From every line in Mr. Dana's ancestry there was gathered 
into him a deep and abiding faith in God and in the revela^ 
tion of Himself through Christ. His personal religious his- 
tory was similar to that of many a New Englander. His 
sentiment revolted at the hard and intellectual conception of 
the faith as expressed in the orthodoxy of his youth. His 
practical and positive temperament was not satisfied with the 
transcendental religion which expressed itself in vague as- 
pirations after the power that makes for righteousness. 
Hence he was drawn to the expression of Christian faith as 
found in the Episcopal Church, the daughter of the Church 
of England. He liked background in his family history, he 
liked it in his church. Its simplicity and positiveness of 
faith supported him, and its liturgy and sacraments com- 
forted and inspired him. Faithful and devoted as a member 
and officer of the Church, he carried his religion into every 
detail of his life, — into the slightest duty. He made it also 
the atmosphere of his home and the support of the members 
of his family. Prayer and religious conversation were as 
natural as the converse of children and friends. His re- 
ligious faith sustained him in days of disappointment and 



6 THE CAIMBRIDGE HISTORICAL SOCIETY [Oct. 

carried him in serenity through times of physical danger and 
lifted him to the great heights of chivalry. 

When Matthew Arnold told the English people that the 
Memoirs of General Grant were a great piece of English 
literature they rubbed their eyes and wondered how it was 
possible for a man so slightly educated, from their academic 
point of view, to write a great piece of English literature. 
General Grant had the subtle faculty of observation and of 
expressing what he observed in such language that others 
can see what he saw. Mr. Dana had that same genius, the 
capacity of observation and of revealing to others in simple 
language what he saw and thus bringing him beside the 
reader in the vision which he wished to express. That 
faculty or genius runs all through " Two Years Before the 
Mast " as it runs through " Robinson Crusoe." 

We have many of us been to a New England funeral in 
the country, and we have most of us read more or less of 
Daniel Webster, but if one wants to be carried right into the 
atmosphere of New England as she was some seventy years 
ago and to gain a conception of the masterfulness of Daniel 
Webster, let him read only half a dozen pages of Mr. Dana 
as he describes the funeral of Daniel Webster at Marshfield. 
There we seem to enter into the spirit of Massachusetts, into 
its quaint habits, and there I say we gain a conception of the 
power of Daniel Webster such as we may not receive from 
reading volumes descriptive of that power. 

Mr. Dana therefore had a literary genius, and it is that we 
may gain a fuller conception of that literary genius that we 
are to listen to Professor Bliss Perry on " Dana as a Man 
of Letters." 



1915.] DANA AS A MAN OF LETTERS 7 

RICHARD HENRY DANA AS A MAN OF LETTERS 

BLISS PERRY 

The popular impression of Richard Henry Dana is that he was a 
man of one book. Such impressions are not always infallible, and 
yet the offhand, instinctive judgment upon which they rest is 
usually right enough for all practical purposes. In Dana's case 
the popular verdict is not likely to be reversed. It is one of the 
ironies of literature that this son of a poet, inheriting so much that 
was finest in the old New England culture, a pupil of Emerson, 
trained at Harvard, toiling gallantly in a great profession, a public- 
spirited citizen of a commonwealth which he served nobly and with- 
out much tangible reward, should be chiefly remembered by his 
record of an enforced holiday in his boyhood — by what he him- 
self called a " parenthesis " in his life. 

But the irony, as happens so often with irony, serves to reveal a 
fundamental law. It explains this author's nature. In that " pa- 
renthesis," as in the parenthesis or postscript of many of our private 
letters, Dana unconsciously expressed himself. His two years as a 
common sailor offered him the magical human chance, and he took it. 
There was something in him for which the decorous and conventional 
life of Boston, in the thirty years preceding the Civil War, allowed 
no place in its scheme. " Two Years Before the Mast " belongs to 
the literature of escape. In as true a sense as Thoreau's " Walden" 
or Parkman's "Oregon Trail" it is a record of an excureion into the 
uncivilized, the actual; or, as Robert Louis Stevenson puts it, "not 
the shoddy sham world of cities, clubs and colleges, but the world 
where men still lead a man's life." Here Dana could truly express 
himself, although self-expression was one of the last things that he 
had in mind. He intended a descriptive narrative of objective 
fact, "to present the life of a common sailor at sea as it really is," 
and the task was perfectly suited to his simple, earnest nature, 
to his lucid mind and style, to his self-forgetful interest in men 
and things that lay beyond the horizon of conventionality. 

He was fortunate, then, in the relation of his theme to himself. 
It was adapted to his powers of observation and description, con- 
genial to his natural tastes and sympathies. The real romance of 



8 THE CAMBRIDGE HISTORICAL SOCIETY [Oct. 

adventure revealed itself gradually to a temperament hitherto 
chiefly responsive to the note of literary romanticism. Books had 
prepared the way. Young Dana knew his Spenser and Byron, 
Wordsworth and Scott. It is characteristic of his generation that 
he finds Robinson Crusoe's island, on his outward voyage, " the most 
romantic spot on earth" his eyes had ever seen; that "San Juan 
is the only romantic spot in California," and that he experienced 
here a "glow of pleasure at finding that what of poetry and ro- 
mance I ever had in me had not been entirely deadened by the 
laborious and frittering life I had led"; that the solitary grave of 
the English captain at San Pedro "was the only thing in California 
from which I could ever extract anything like poetry." His heart 
beats fast when he discovers at San Pedro a volume of Scott's 
"Pirate," and when he finds at San Diego, at the bottom of 
a sea chest, Godwin's "Mandeville, a Romance," he drinks de» 
light as from a "spring in a desert land." Very real to him was 
this romantic sentimentalism, and very characteristic of a bookish 
boy in the year 1835. But was it true that only in such moods 
lurked the spirit of poetry? Dana's own narrative answers him 
with a triumphant negative. The unconscious element of his story 
has outlasted the self-conscious. How about sending down the 
1 royal yard in Monterey harbor, when the "well done" of the mate 
j gave him as much satisfaction as he ever felt at Cambridge on see- 
l ing a " bene " at the foot of a Latin exercise? How about running 
\ the surf at Santa Barbara? Or swinging off a four-hundred-foot 
cliff, at San Juan, on a pair of halyards, to save a few hides, and 
being told for his pains: "What a d — d fool you were to risk your 
life for half-a-dozen hides ! " How about furling the ice-covered jib 
while drenched with the long combers off Cape Horn? To Richard 
Dana's straightforward mind such things were all in the day's work. 
They were duties that must be done, and he did them, as he described 
them, in all simplicity. He told the pedagogic Horace Mann that 
his book "had life," but he could not then realize that to a 
later generation, taught by Kipling and Conrad, this very day's 
work was the essence of romance, while the glimpse of Robinson 
Crusoe's island and the lonely California grave of the forgotten 
Englishman were only its accidents, its mere fringe of literary 
association. 



1915.1 DANA AS A MAN OF LETTERS 9 

Another good fortune lay in the obvious framework and sequence 
of the story. Like Defoe's most famous narrative, it had its natural 
beginning, its natural series of climaxes, and its due return to the 
starting-point. No artificial literary plot could be better curved 
than that outward voyage of the brig Pilgrim in August, 1834, the 
timeless sojourn in the new land of California, then the long beat 
homeward of the ship Alert around the Horn and up past the 
equator and into Boston harbor in September, 1836. Fact is an 
artist, though not always the master artist, and in Dana's case fact 
served him as faithfully as the north star. He made his selections, 
of course, from the diary of experience, but that instinct for the 
essential point, which afterward made him a good lawyer, is evi- 
dent in the orderliness with which he presents the cardinal features 
of a complex situation. He was not tempted, like some greater 
writers of the sea, such as Pierre Loti and Conrad, into over- 
subtlety. He is sometimes, like Kipling, over-technical, but it is 
due to an honest boyish enthusiasm for the right name of every 
rope. 

Dana was fortunate, above all, in his youthfulness. He wrote 
at twenty-two. The "parenthesis" did not come, as it comes to 
many men, even if it comes at all, too late in their life-sentence. 
" Yet we were young " is the best comment upon the hardships of 
himself and his companions in California. " Yet we were young " ; 
young enough to "like anything in the way of variety," to feel that 
the prospect of a change "sets life in motion." Nothing is more 
touching in Dana's later diaries and correspondence than his belief 
that this gift of youth, under different circumstances, might still 
be perennially liis. He writes at the age of thirty-nine, after a sail- 
ing vo^^age to the Maine coast: "I believe I was made for the sea 
and that all my hfe on shore is a mistake. I was intended by nature 
for a general roamer and traveller by sea and land, with occasional 
edits of narratives, and my duties as lawyer, scholar and publicist 
are all out of the way." Years afterward he writes to his wife from 
Minnesota: "We ought to have been travellers; had no profession 
and no home, and roamed over the world together, like two civilized 
and refined gypsies." " My life has been a failure," he wrote in 
1873, "compared with what I might and ought to have done. My 
great success — my book — was a boy's work, done before I came 



10 THE CAMBRIDGE HISTORICAL SOCIETY [Oct. 

to the Bar," His sojourn at Castellamare in May, 1881, a few 
months before his death, seemed to him "a dream of life." Such 
confessions as tliese are the outbreak of an essentially romantic 
temperament, forced by external circumstances to compete with 
the persons whom he described perfectly in his first book as the 
people who never walk in but one line from their cradle to their 
grave. Boston was full of such people then, as it is still. 

One cannot say whether Dana would have been happier had his 
desire for a life of romantic travel been granted. Certainly he was 
denied that other dream of his, equally romantic, equally like cer- 
tain moods of Chateaubriand, in which Dana, who sighed and wept 
all day over Charlotte Yonge's "Heir of Redcliffe," desired to give 
himself "to contemplation, to religious exercises, to nature, to art, 
to the best of reading and study." This, too, was not to be. He 
was disappointed, said his law partner, Mr. Parker, in every high 
ambition of his life. But to dwell upon this phase of his human 
hunger for the food that is just out of reach is to forget the great 
good luck of his boyhood, that golden parenthesis of nineteen to 
twenty-one, to which he chiefly owes to-day the place he holds in 
human memory. 

I am not forgetful, of course, and no one who has read Dana's 
published work can be unmindful, of the literary excellence of his 
miscellaneous writings. He was always the master of a clear, direct, 
and vigorous style, warmed by broad sympathies and sometimes 
heightened by passionate feeling. His arguments for the reading 
of the Bible in public schools, on the Judiciary, and on the Rendi- 
tion of Anthony Burns are notable even in a generation of notable 
addresses. The fine irony of his attack upon Webster in the imag- 
inary "Great Gravitation Meeting," the acute perception and mas- 
culine force of his " Grasp of War " speech, his exhaustive " Note on 
the Monroe Doctrine," his ingenious though unsuccessful argument 
before the Halifax Fishery Commission, in which he describes the 
men of Gloucester as vividly as Burke, three quarters of a century 
before, had described the deep-sea fishermen of the Atlantic — these 
are characteristic examples of his learning and eloquence. His de- 
lightful narrative of a brief journey "To Cuba and Back" exhibits 
his dispassionate grasp of complicated political and social condi- 
tions, the free play of an acute and orderly intelligence. To those 



1915.] DANA AS A MAN OF LETTERS 11 

who infer that Dana's harassed and overburdened mature life was 
without gleams of imagination, let me quote one sentence from his 
eulogy of Rufus Choate before the Suffolk bar, that bar that had 
listened, not many years before, to Choate's own eulogy of Webster: 

" Sir, I speak for myself, — I have no right to speak for others, 
— but I can truly say, without any exaggeration, taking for the 
moment a simile from that element which he loved as much as I 
love it, though it rose against his life at last, — that in his presence 
I felt like the master of a small coasting vessel, that hugs the shore, 
that has run up under the lee to speak to a great homeward-bound 
Indiaman, freighted with silks and precious stones, spices and costly 
fabrics, with sky-sails and studding-sails spread to the breeze, with 
the nation's flag at her mast-head, navigated by the mysterious 
science of the fixed stars, and not unprepared with weapons of de- 
fence, her decks peopled with men in strange costumes, speaking of 
strange climes and distant lands. ..." 

Such writing lingers in the memory, though it be only the mem- 
ory of a few. But for one American who has read Dana's " Speeches 
in Stirring Times" there are thousands throughout the English- 
speaking world who have shared with the boyish Dana his pleasure 
in the "perfect silence of the sea" and "the early breaking of day 
on the wide ocean," his awe at "the cold and angry skies" and 
"long heavy ugly seas" off the Cape, who have seen with him 
the "malignant" brightness of the lightning in the tropical storm, 
tlie yellow California sunsliine and the gray California fog, and the 
slow, stately motion of the groaning Antarctic icebergs with the 
whirling snow about their summits. Once, on the homeward 
voyage, there came to him an experience thus described: 

"One night, while we were in these tropics, I went out to the end of 
the flying- jib boom, upon some duty, and, having finished it, turned 
round, and lay over the boom for a long time, admiring the beauty of 
the sight before me. Being so far out from the deck, I could look at 
the ship, as at a separate vessel; — and, there rose up from the water, 
supported only by the small black hull, a pyramid of canvas, spreading 
out far beyond the hull, and towering up almost, as it seemed in the in- 
distinct night air, to the clouds. The sea was as still as an inland lake ; 
the light trade wind was gently and steadily breathing from astern ; the 
dark blue sky was studded with the tropical stars ; there was no sound 



12 THE CAMBRIDGE HISTORICAL SOCIETY [Oct. 

but the rippling of the water under the stem ; and the sails were spread 
out, wide and high ; the two lower studding-sails stretching, on each 
side, far beyond the deck ; the top-mast studding sails, like wings to 
the top-sails ; the top-gallant studding-sails spreading fearlessly out 
above them ; still higher, the two roj^al studding-sails, looking like two 
kites flying from the same string ; and highest of all, the little sky-sail, 
the apex of the pyramid, seeming actually to touch the stars, and to be 
out of reach of human hand. So quiet, too, was the sea, and so steady 
the breeze, that if these sails had been sculptured marble, they could 
not have been more motionless. Not a ripple upon the surface of the 
canvas ; not even a quivering of the extreme edges of the sail — so per- 
fectly were they distended by the breeze. I was so lost in the sight, 
that I forgot the presence of the man who came out with me, until he 
said, (for he too, rough old man-of-war's man as he was, had been gaz- 
ing at the show) half to himself, still looking at the marble sails — 
'How quietly they do their work !'" 

There, at least, is the magical moment, and what matters it 
whether the moment comes early or late in a writer's life? It is 
all the same, said Marcus Aurelius, whether a man looks on these 
things three years or a hundred. No, it is not quite the same; 
surely that man is to be envied who has seen the vision of beauty 
and has had the felicity of recording it, in the days of his youth. 

Bishop Lawrence. One of the greatest tests of moral 
courage is in the readiness of a man of high social position 
to throw away his position for a cause. It called for great 
courage in the early fifties to be an antislavery leader, but at 
that time the antislavery people, most of them, had very little 
social position. They were most of them unknown men and 
women. Mr. Dana took great satisfaction in his descent and 
in his social position. Therefore when he entered into the 
ranks of the antislavery leaders he showed exceptional moral 
courage, — for in those days it meant ostracism from many 
whose company he counted the dearest and whose regard he 
highly esteemed. Hence when Mr. Dana entered the list of 
antislavery leaders he not only risked, and to a certain degree 
threw away, his social position, but he at the same time 



1 



1915.] DANA AS AN ANTISLAVERY LEADER 13 

contributed to the cause of the antislavery advocates some- 
thing which was of great value to them in bringing their 
cause before the people. It is the story of Mr. Dana as an 
antislavery leader that Mr. Moorfield Storey will tell us this 
evening. 

DANA AS AN ANTISLAVERY LEADER 
MOORFIELD STOREY 

We are wont to speak of the years when our Fathers were 
struggling for independence as " the times that tried men's souls," 
but such times are not peculiar to any generation, and the sons 
have endured trials quite as severe as those which tested the man- 
hood of their sires. The leaders of the Revolution had behind 
them all their friends and neighbors except a small minority. They 
had the solace of popularity. During the four years of civil war 
our souls were tried and our hearts were very sore, for we knew 
that the future of our country and the freedom of a race were at 
stake, and our hopes rose and fell as the varying fortunes of the 
war now discouraged and now cheered us. But the people on each 
side were substantially united and felt that they won or lost with 
the whole community in which they lived. We had at least that 
company which " misery loves." 

So to-day in the great struggle for civilization and freedom which 
desolates Europe, every soldier feels that behind him and beside 
him are his fellow countrymen, all standing together and fighting 
for everything that men hold dear. It is far easier to fight with so 
great a host than to stand with truth on the scaffold and face the 
opposition not only of the crowd, but of friends whom we love and 
respect. It takes more courage to lead a forlorn hope than to 
charge with a triumphant army. 

The souls of the men who began the war against human slavery 
were put to the supreme test of courage and endurance. No pop- 
ular sympathy upheld their hands or cheered their efforts. Strange 
as it seems to us, only fifty years since Richmond fell, the public 
opinion of the United States before the civil war, supported human 
slavery, was blind to its atrocities, and regarded its opponents as 



14 THE CAMBRIDGE HISTORICAL SOCIET^T [Oct. 

enemies of society. To tliem the avenues which lead to worldly- 
success were closed. The great business interests of the country, 
the great political parties, the church, the universities, the leaders 
of society, the men to whom their fellow citizens looked for guid- 
ance frowned upon the advocates of human freedom, while the 
mobs which murdered Lovejoy and dragged Garrison through the 
streets of Boston only showed to what personal peril the anti- 
slavery men were exposed. 

Mr. Emerson in an unpublished diary states the situation in 
graphic language: 

"'Tis against the plain interest of young men to allow freedom. 
Young man! the poor Kansas settlers give no elegant suppers, no 
Saturday dinners, no private box have they at the opera. If you vote 
to garrote them, and stand by Missouri and the Union, j'ou can just as 
well praise the Kansas of a thousand years ago, namely Marathon : talk 
just as glibly of Milton and the Puritans. You can edit Landor : you 
can, like Guizot and Sparks, write eulogies of Washington. Judges, 
bank presidents, railroad men, men of fashion, lawyers universally, all 
take the side of slavery. What a poor blind devil are you to break 
your shins for a bit of moonshine against the goodwill of the whole 
community. 'Meanness,' do you say? Yes, but when meanness is in 
such good company, when the university and the faculty of law and of 
medicine and of divinity itself are infinitely mean, who knows which is 
meanness? What a fool, when the whole world has lost its wits, to be 
the only sane man," 

Is it not strange that in the land of the free, — the hope of the 
oppressed, among a people brought up to believe that " all men are 
created equal " and who professed to be Christians, a system so 
truly described as " the sum of all the villainies " should be ap- 
proved by men of hght and leading ? When as a junior in Hai'vard 
College I walked over the Blue Hills on the day that we heard of 
Lee's surrender, I remember saying to my companion : " It is diffi- 
cult even now to believe that slavery ever existed in this country," 
and I have never since ceased to wonder at the state of feeling here 
in Massachusetts between 1845 and 1860, for she was " kneelin' 
with the rest." 

In 1845 Mr. Dana was only thirty years old. He had been mar- 
ried for four years and had childi-en. He was dependent on his 



1915.] DANA AS AN ANTISLAVERY LEADER 15 

earnings, but his social connections were of the best, his reputation 
for ability was established, and his professional success seemed 
assured. He was conservative by nature, and had no sympathy 
with the abolition movement, as is shown by the following entry 
in his diary made in June, 1843, after seeing something of the pro- 
ceedings in " the anti-slavery convention." 

" The elements of which the convention was composed are dreadful. 
Heated, narrow-minded, self-willed, excited, unchristian, radical energies 
set to work upon a cause which is good, if rightly managed, but which 
they have made a hotbed for forcing into growth the most dangerous 
doctrines to both church and state. They are nearly all at the extreme 
of radicalism, socialism and infidelity." 

Yet he was a Free Soiler, and in a letter to Daniel Lord of New 
York he gave his reasons for his faith. From this letter I quote : 

"1. I am a Free Soiler by inheritance. I am the son and grandson 
of Federalists. The northern Federalists were decided Free Soilers. 
The exclusion of slavery from the Northwest territory is owing to them. 
In New England they opposed the Missouri compromise to the last. 
The yielding to the South on that point in 1820, the parent of so much 
evil, was by the Democrats. . . . 

" 2. I am a Free Soiler by education. I was educated a Whig. The 
Whig party of New England has been a decided Anti-slavery and Free 
Soil party up to and through the contest of 1848. I will agree to adopt 
no positions on the slave question, or any great matter, for which I 
cannot vouch the unanimous or all but unanimous resolves of the Whig 
legislatures and conventions of Massachusetts. . . . 

" 3, My conservatism leads me to it. There is a compound of self- 
ishness and cowardice which often takes to itself the honored name of 
Conservatism. That false conservatism I call Hunkerism. Now, 
hunkerism, of all names and sections. Whig or Democratic, making ma- 
terial prosperity and ease its pole star, will do nothing and risk nothing 
for a moral principle. But not so conservatism. Conservatism some- 
times requires a risking or sacrificing of material advantages. Radi- 
calism, also, will do nothing to resist the growth of slavery, because 
that is purely an act of justice to others. It is not our freedom that is 
at stake. If it were, the Tammany Hall mob would be on our side and 
beyond us. But in a case for liberal, comprehensive justice to others, 
with only a remote and chiefly moral advantage, conservatism is more 
reliable than radicalism. . . ." 



16 THE CAMBRIDGE HISTORICAL SOCIETY [Oct. 

He stated his position publicly on taking the chair at a Free Soil 
meeting in July, 1848, after the antislavery agitation had become 
intense. He then said: 

" I am a Whig, a "Whig of the old school: I may say, without affecta- 
tion, a highly conservative Whig. ... I am in favor of supporting 
all the compromises of the Constitution in good faith, as well as in 
profession. 

"Why then am I here? I understand this to be no meeting for 
transcendental purposes, or abolition purposes, or politico-moral re- 
form. . . . The ' subject of our story ' is simply this. Massachusetts 
has deliberately taken a position in favor of excluding slavery from new 
territories, leaving each state now in the Union to manage its own 
slavery. . . . The Convention at Springfield last autumn unanimously 
passed the resolution I hold in my hand : 

" Resolved, That if the War shall be prosecuted to the final subjuga- 
tion and dismemberment of Mexico, the Whigs of Massachusetts now 
declare, and put this declaration of their purpose on record, that Mass- 
achusetts will never consent that American territory, however acquired, 
shall become a part of the American Union, unless on the unalterable 
condition that ' there shall be neither Slavery nor involuntary servitude 
therein, otherwise than in the punishment of crime.' Now, we are here 
because we intend to adhere to this resolution." 

The Whig leaders having made it apparent by their silence as 
well as by their speeches for General Taylor, the Whig candidate 
for President, that they either did not "think the Free Soil ques- 
tion of consequence enough to speak upon," or that they did not 
feel at liberty to speak upon it, Dana refused to follow them. 

Stated briefly, his position was that slavery was so great an evil 
that it could not be tolerated in territories where it did not exist, 
but that under the Constitution we could not interfere with it in the 
states where it was already established. This was the platform on 
which the Republican party was founded and upon which it made 
the contests in 1856 which resulted in the defeat of Fremont, and 
in 1860, when its victory made Abraham Lincoln president. In 
1848, however, there were few who were ready to accept this doc- 
trine. Mr. Dana was one of the few who left the Whig party and 
attended the Free Soil convention at Buffalo which nominated 
Van Buren and Adams. Into this independent movement he 



1915.] DANA AS AN ANTISLAVERY LEADER 17 

threw himself with all his might ; and while the result of the effort, 
measured by the votes cast at the election, was insignificant, nev- 
ertheless it sounded the knell of the Whig party and sowed the 
seed from which the Republican party was so soon to spring. Its 
seeming defeat was really a glorious victory. The men who met 
in Buffalo made the antislavery movement practical, and began 
the campaign which ended in the emancipation proclamation and 
in Appomattox. 

Throughout this struggle Dana stood firmly with the Free S oil- 
ers and Republicans, but he supported them as a citizen and not as 
a politician, though generally in close touch with the Republican 
leaders. A brilliant political career was open to him, his abilities 
fitted him to lead, and his inclination prompted him to enter political 
life, but on the other hand the demands of his family made him stick 
to his profession, and in 1852, when he was asked to preside at the 
meeting held in Faneuil Hall to ratify the Free Soil nominations, 
he made his choice and refused, but his diary records his difficulty 
in reaching his conclusion : 

" Never more distressed in my life to make a decision. Talked with 
Adams, Wilson and others. All wanted me to speak. Very reluctantly 
and quite unsatisfied determined to decline. Did so. I do not know 
that I ever so much regretted the want of property to enable me to do 
a great public duty." 

"His poverty but not his will" declined, and the community 
lost the services of an able, brave, and sincere man whose presence 
in the public councils would have been invaluable during the great 
struggle which was then impending. 

As I have said, every instinct of this conservative lawyer and 
churchman, this believer in constitution and law, made him a 
supporter of existing institutions and an opponent of agitators and 
fanatics ; but when Texas had been annexed and the slave owners, 
growing more arrogant, passed the Fugitive Slave law, he rose to 
the emergency. This law permitted a man to swear before any 
obscure magistrate in a slave state that another man was his slave, 
and then required the marshals and commissioners of the United 
States, without considering whether this ex 'parte affidavit was true, 
to arrest the alleged slave and deliver him to the claimant on proof 



18 THE CAMBRIDGE HISTORICAL SOCIETY [Oct. 

only that the person arrested was the person mentioned in the affi- 
davit, giving the commissioner if he remanded the slave a fee of 
ten dollars, and if he decided against the claimant a fee of only 
five, — a small bribe, you will say, but this was the day of small 
things, and the men who framed the law thought the difference 
worth making. By express provision of the law the testimony of 
the alleged fugitive could not be admitted, but, in the case of An- 
thony Burns, his casual replies to questions asked by the claimant 
after his arrest were admitted against him to establish his identity. 
His word could be taken to keep him a slave, but his oath would 
not avail to make him free. Had any one under such a law sought 
to take another's horse the community would have risen in arms 
against it, but when it was used to deprive a man and his descend- 
ants forever of freedom, the American people as a whole approved. 
There were men who could not submit to such a travesty of law, 
men in whose hearts and minds the spirit of Anglo-Saxon freedom 
was too deeply rooted, and among them Mr. Dana was a leader. 
His opportunity came when a negro living in Boston as Frederick 
Jenkins was arrested as a fugitive slave under the name of Shad- 
rach, and Mr. Dana in his diary states what followed : 

"While in my office at about 10:30 Mr. Charles Davis, Parker and 
others came in and told me that the marshal had a fugitive slave in 
custody in the United States court room before Mr. George T. Curtis 
as commissioner. I went immediately over to the Court House." 

He did not wait for a summons, but without hesitation volun- 
teered to defend the unfortunate negro against the power of the 
United States, a step which affected his whole future, as he was 
soon to realize. 

He was accepted by Jenkins as his counsel, and at once " pre- 
pared a writ of ' de homine replegiando ' and a petition for a habeas 
corpus addressed to Chief Justice Shaw." Quoting again from 
Mr. Dana's diary : 

"With this petition I called on the Chief Justice and stated to him 
that it was a case of an alleged fugitive slave, and that our object was 
to test the constitutional power of the commissoner to issue a warrant. 
The Chief Justice read the petition and said in a most ungracious man- 
ner, 'This won't do. I can't do anything on this,' and laid it upon the 
table and turned away to engage in something else." 



1915.1 DANA AS AN ANTISLAVERY LEADER 19 

Dana persisted and forced the Chief Justice from one objection 
to another, and as we read them we share Dana's opinion that they 
were " frivolous and invahd " ; but finding the judge determined not 
to grant the writ, he withdrew to consider what further steps to 
take. Judge Metcalf, a man little inclined to speak, was present 
at Dana's interview with Judge Shaw, "and expressed himself very 
much disturbed by the conduct of the chief," and it is melancholy 
to think that the Chief Justice of Massachusetts should make every 
attempt to evade his duty in a case of such vital importance. While 
.Dana was considering the situation, Jenkins or Shadrach was res- 
cued, and so the case ended. 

From that time on, to quote his own words, he had " the privi- 
lege of being counsel for every fugitive slave and for most of those 
who were indicted for rescue," and he discharged his duty as coun- 
sel with unflinching courage, great ability, and in most cases with 
success. It is impossible for us now to realize against what obsta- 
cles and at what a sacrifice he did this work. 

When Sims, the next alleged fugitive slave, was arrested, " Mr. 
Sewall applied to the Supreme Court for a habeas corpus, and it 
was refused without argument. After it was refused Mr. Sewall 
asked leave to address the court in favor of the petition, and was 
refused." This was no pettifogger seeking to raise a frivolous 
question, but an eminent member of the bar representing all that 
was best in Massachusetts, of ancient descent and singularly high 
character, whom the court refused even to hear on a great question 
of human freedom. No wonder that during the following Saturday 
and Sunday leading lawyers like Charles G. Loring and Franklin 
Dexter spoke privately to the court, and that on their urgency an 
intimation was given that argument would be heard. Accordingly 
on the next day, without preparation, Mr. Dana addressed the court, 
and Mr. Rantoul followed, and within a few hours the court re- 
fused the writ. Such proceedings make us hesitate to speak of the 
" good old times," but they lend force to every argument against 
an elective judiciary or the recall of decisions or judges, since they 
prove that even a magistrate like Chief Justice Shaw could not 
rise above the political feeling of his time. This was a single in- 
stance of weakness, a single blot on a great judicial career. How 
much worse would our conditions be if, as a rule, a seat on the 



20 THE CAMBRIDGE HISTORICAL SOCIETY [Oct. 

bench could be obtained or held only by adopting the political 
views of the popular majority for the moment ! 

The men whom Dana served belonged to the weakest class in 
the world. They had neither votes, influence, nor property, nor 
even the rights of human beings. They could give him no com- 
pensation for his services, and when it was offered by others he 
returned it in a letter from which I quote the following : 

" They [the donors] give me more credit than I am willing to receive. 
The good fortune which is said to attend early rising made me one of 
the first of the members of the bar, if not the first, to hear that there 
was a man in custody as a slave in the court room. To render myself 
at once on the spot and to offer my professional services to him and to 
those who were coming forward as his friends was an act I trust natural 
to me, and requiring no effort or sacrifice. ... I have done so in the 
cause of alleged slaves in Boston heretofore, and so have others, and 
I hope the members of the bar in Massachusetts will never fail to be 
ready to render this service gratuitously to the cause of humanity and 
freedom. A portion of my time and the application of such influence 
and ability as I may possess is the only contribution I have to make. . . . 

"Besides my own feeling in the matter, which would be conclusive 
with me, I would not have the force of the precedent, which has been 
set in the trials for freedom in Massachusetts thus far, impaired in the 
least for the honor of my profession and the welfare of those in peril." 

These are words which it is pleasant to read in these days. 

His course exposed him to serious personal danger. On the 
evening of the very day when Anthony Burns was carried back to 
slavery through the sullen streets of Boston, Dana was attacked 
on his way home by a ruffian hired to assault him, and received 
a blow which, had it fallen a very little to the right or left, would 
have blinded and perhaps killed him. The history of the attack 
and the capture and conviction of his assailant is a very interesting 
story, unhappily too long to be related here. 

Having nothing to expect from his clients or their friends, he 
had on the other hand to face not only the frowns of the court and 
the hostility of society, but, as Mr. Adams says: "From the pro- 
fessional point of view this open and conscientious adhesion to the 
unpopular side affected Dana much more. . . . Nearly all the 
wealth and the moneyed institutions of Boston were controlled by 



1915.] DANA AS AN ANTISLAVERY LEADER 21 

the conservatives, and among the moneyed institutions were the 
marine insurance companies. The ship-owners and merchants were 
Whigs ahnost to a man. It is, therefore, safely within the mark 
to say that Dana's political course between 1848 and 1860 not only 
retarded his professional advancement, but seriously impaired his 
income. It kept the rich clients from his office. He was the 
counsel of the sailor and the slave, — persistent, courageous, hard- 
fighting, skilful, but still the advocate of the poor and the unpop- 
ular. In the mind of wealthy and respectable Boston almost any 
one was to be preferred to him — the Free Soil lawyer, the counsel 
for the fugitive slave, alert, indomitable, always on hand. The 
Boston Advertiser even published an article signed by ' The Son 
of a Merchant ' calling on all merchants to withdraw their business 
from Mr. Dana and to proclaim non-intercourse. It is impossible 
to say how many clients were prevented from going to Dana dur- 
ing his years of active practice by considerations of this sort; but 
the number was unquestionably large, and the interests they repre- 
sented larger still. Indeed, brilliant as was his career at the bar, 
he never had what would be considered a lucrative practice ; and 
that he did not have such a practice was due to prejudice connected 
with his early political associations. He too suffered for his advo- 
cacy of the poor and the oppressed. . . . Up to 1848 he was on 
exactly the right path, — the path to distinctive professional emi- 
nence. Had he adhered to it, he not improbably would at least 
have attained, had he so desired, that foremost place in the judiciary 
of Massachusetts once held by his grandfather. Most assuredly he 
would have risen to the front rank of his profession as a jurist of 
national fame." 

His partner, Francis E. Parker, wrote after Mr. Dana's death : 

"Baffled as he had been for more than twenty years, disappointed in 
every high ambition of his Ufe, fallen in evil times and evil tongues, 
how bravely he kept his courage ! " 

It is true that he won neither great wealth nor high office, and 
that in his own commonwealth he saw many win both who were in 
no way superior to him in ability or character, like his arch-enemy 
Benjamin F. Butler ; but " the wise years decide." Weighed in 
the true scales, could any fortune, however large, or any office, 



22 THE CAMBRIDGE HISTORICAL SOCIETY [Oct. 

however high, — could anything that he won for himself outbalance 
the unselfish service which he rendered to others ? Is self-sacrifice 
failure ? ShaU we measure success by what a man gets or by what 
he gives ? Shall we forget the immortal words, " Inasmuch as ye 
have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren ye have 
done it unto me ? " 

Let us rather hold him up to the generous youth of this country 
as an example of the highest success, and say with Mr. Adams: 
" His connection with those cases was the one great professional 
and political act of his life. It was simply superb. There is noth- 
ing fairer or nobler in the long, rich archives of the law ; and the 
man who holds that record in his hand may stand with head erect 
at the bar of final judgment itself." 

Bishop Lawrence. No son of Harvard is more welcome 
than Mr. Choate. His loyalty to Harvard is expressed in a 
characteristic remark some years ago when he said, "When 
in London if I heard the name of any young man rising to 
distinction in America, no matter what part of America, I 
always took up the Quinquennial and looked to see in what 
year he graduated." 

We have just heard the eulogy of Rufus Choate by Mr. 
Dana, and we can be confident that if Mr. Dana could speak 
he would be much gratified to know that his position as a 
lawyer and a jurist was to be presented by Joseph Choate. 



DANA AS A LAWYER AND A CITIZEN 
JOSEPH H. CHOATE 

I REGARDED it as a great honor to be asked to prepare a paper 
about Richard H. Dana, as a lawyer and citizen, for the celebration 
of the centenaiy of his birth. 

He has been dead for thirty-four years, and sleeps in the old 
Protestant cemetery at Rome in company with Shelley and Keats 
in a land which he loved to visit and where his closing years 
were spent. 



1915.] DANA AS A LAWYER AND A CITIZEN 23 

At such a distance of time the professional life and work of any 
lawyer, however distinguished, ceases to be of general interest 
unless connected with events which have become historical and of 
surpassing human interest. Fortunately for Mr. Dana, his active 
professional and public life of twenty-five years embraced the pe- 
riod of the Civil War and the thrilling events which preceded and 
followed it, and he was able to render signal services to the state 
and the nation which ought never to be forgotten. 

The unusual fame which he had acquired as a very young man 
by the publication of " Two Years Before the Mast," which still 
reads like a romance and a companion-piece to " Robinson Crusoe," 
and the publication of the "Seaman's Friend," which naturally 
followed it, necessarily brought him a sort of maritime practice 
when he was admitted to the bar and opened a law office in 1841 
at the age of twenty-six. 

He had just married, was without independent means, and had 
every incentive, as he had abundant ability, to take a leading place 
in the profession for which his keen intelKgence, his habits of pro- 
found thought, and his soaring ambition naturally fitted him. 
There was another thing which doubtless stimulated his hope and 
desire for the rapid advance in professional and public affairs, which 
might well have been expected from his brilliant talents and his 
undisputed ability. He was justly proud of his distinguished lin- 
eage, which ran back into colonial days. Several of his direct an- 
cestors, whose names can be found in the Harvard Catalogue, had 
taken part in the public life of New England. His grandfather, 
Francis Dana, had been a delegate from Massachusetts to the Con- 
tinental Congress, had signed the Articles of Confederation, had 
been appointed minister to Russia during the Revolutionary War, 
and after the adoption of the Constitution was for fifteen years 
Chief Justice of Massachusetts. There were, also, in the maternal 
line of his ancestry two colonial governors and a signer of the 
Declaration of Independence. 

It cannot be denied, however, that he had a certain fastidiousness 
of manner which kept him aloof from the ordinary run of men. 
He had a natural liking for the best company, which he always 
frequented, and no desire to cultivate miscellaneous acquaintances, 
none of the hail-fellow-well-met to everybody, which naturally 



24 THE CMIBRIDGE HISTORICAL SOCIETY [Oct. 

tends to promote a young man's rapid advancement in the profes- 
sion or in public life. But for all that he had a genuine enthusiasm 
for popular liberty and equality under the law, and an abiding faith 
in government of the people, by the people, and for the people, as 
it was advocated by Lincoln. 

I doubt, too, whether he had that all-absorbing love of the law 
which is necessary to a highly sustained professional career. He 
loved to travel, and was particularly fond of the society of superior 
men and women. He evidently had a strong liking for public Hfe, 
and an ambition for high office, which he was admirably qualified 
to fill, so that he followed the law rather as a means of livelihood 
than as an exalted vocation to which he could devote all his strong 
and manly qualities, and strive for success in it as though there 
were no other object worth living for. 

His personal devotion to Washington AUston, who had married 
his father's sister, was strikingly characteristic, and I think he 
derived from AUston some of his habits of thought and of action. 

Allston, besides being a great artist, was a man of rare and 
delicate and sensitive personality, quite likely to impress strongly 
a high-toned youth like Dana. 

The latter says of him in his Journal : " He says that if things 
go on as they promise now that * in eighty years there will not be 
a gentleman left in the country.' He says that the manners of 
gentility, its courtesies, its deferences, and graces are passing away 
from among us. Whether they pass away or no, he is a good 
specimen of them. Born of a distinguished family in Carolina, 
and educated in the feelings and habits of a gentleman, with a 
noble nature, a beautiful countenance, and a graceful person, what 
else could he be ? " 

And on the occasion of AUston' s sudden death, he takes leave 
of him in these words : " The exquisite moral sense, the true spir- 
ituality, the kindUness and courtesy of heart as well as of manner, 
the corresponding external elegance, the elevation above the world 
and the men and things of it, where have these ever been so com- 
bined before ? " And the same question might well be asked about 
Mr. Dana. 

His own early and even precocious literary success had some- 
thing, I think, to do with shaping his subsequent life. It gave 



1915.] DANA AS A LAWYER AND A CITIZEN 25 

him an easy footing in the society and friendship of the best men, 
such as Mr. Webster, Judge Story, George Ticknor, Charles Fran- 
cis Adams, Franklin Dexter, Charles Sumner, George S. Hillard, 
and others who were the leaders of New England life, and he stood 
well with them all. Indeed, literature must have been his first 
love, which was evinced by his signal success in that direction 
even before he came of age, and by his devotion in later years to 
the company of those choice and kindred spirits and men of letters 
who composed the famous Saturday Club. 

Mr. Horace Mann he did not altogether like ; and no wonder, for 
there could hardly be two more opposite natures than theirs. 
When Mann was at the head of the Board of Education, he pro- 
posed to Mr. Dana that the Board of Education should publish his 
" Two Years Before the Mast " if he would practically rewrite it 
to suit Mr. Mann's practical ideas, and his account of their inter- 
view at which the matter was discussed is most amusing. It 
ended in Mr. Dana positively refusing to make any substantial 
changes in the book, and Mr. Mann being contented with nothing 
less than changes which would entirely destroy its character. 

Too strenuous labor, after he reached the age of forty-five, seems 
frequently to have overtaxed Mr. Dana's strength. Up to that 
time he had a remarkable buoyancy and vigor which had been 
splendidly fortified by his two years at sea. A weakness of the 
eyes had compelled him to take the voyage of which his book is 
the record, out of the very heart of his college life, coming back to 
graduate with a class two years later than that which he had en- 
tered. From the beginning to the end of his professional life, 
whatever his hands found to do he did it with his might. His 
attention to details was extraordinary, and thus he was always in 
danger of overwork, which compelled him to take frequent vaca- 
tions to counteract that danger. 

There was one great hero with whom these vacation rambles 
brought him into close and interesting contact, and that was John 
Brown, not yet John Brown of Ossawatomie, but a plain and 
rugged farmer of North Elba in the Adirondacks, where he ran 
an active branch of the famous underground railroad, over which 
he was constantly conducting fugitive slaves to freedom. 

More than twenty years afterward Dana wrote an account of it 



26 THE CAMBRIDGE HISTORICAL SOCIETY [Oct. 

for the Atlantio 3IontJdi/, and it is pleasant to read of Mr. Dana, 
fastidious though he was, sitting down to dinner with Mr. Brown 
and " his unlimited family of children, from a cheerful, nice healthy 
woman of twenty or so and a full-sized, red-haired son, who seemed 
to be foreman of the farm, through every grade of boy and girl to 
a couple who could hardly speak plain," and among them two 
fugitive negroes whom he had just brought in and whom he intro- 
duced to Mr. Dana as Mr. Jefferson and Mrs. Wait, as persons of 
entire social equality. 

Little did he think, as he sat at that rude feast of " Ruth's best 
bread, butter, and corn cakes, with some meat and tea," that in a 
few years the rugged farmer, who sat at the head of the table and 
entertained him so cordially, would have become the great martyr 
of freedom, so that his name and his spirit would lead the embat- 
tled hosts of America to the final triumph of liberty and union ! 

Mr. Dana's first venture in politics, in his thirty-third year, in 
1848, marked clearly his independence of spirit, his love of the 
right, and determination to maintain it at whatever cost, and his 
clear foresight into the political future. He had, like almost all 
Massachusetts boys, grown up as a disciple of Mr. Webster. He 
hated the Abolitionists who were altogether too unconventional for 
him, but he made his d^but in political life as chairman of the Free 
Soil meeting at the Tremont Temple. He declared: "I am a 
Free Soiler, because I am (who should not say so) of the stock of 
the old northern gentry, and have a particular dislike to any sub- 
serviency, or even appearance of subserviency, on the part of our 
people to the slaveholding oligarchy. I was disgusted with it in 
college and at the law school, and have been since, in society and 
politics. The spindles and day-books are against us just now, for 
Free Soilism goes to the wrong side of the ledger. The blood, the 
letters, and the people are our chief reliance." 

It was a bold step for a young lawyer and statesman to come out 
in this way in 1848 in Boston, where Webster was still lord of the 
ascendant and where all the best people, with whom Dana had 
always been associated, were his devoted followers, and where 
there was a strong affiliation, as Charles Sumner put it, " between 
the lords of the lash and the lords of the loom." But Dana was 
not dismayed. He went to the B uffalo convention as a delegate 



1915.] DANA AS A LAWYER AND A CITIZEN 27 

and came back to advocate the election of Martin Van Buren for 
President and Charles Francis Adams for Vice-President, and from 
August to November he laid aside his law practice and devoted 
himself to making speeches for this seemingly hopeless cause, 
which he had the foresight to see would result by and by in the 
collapse of the Whig party and the prevention of the further ex- 
tension of slavery. From this time forward he was generally 
recognized as one of the most brilliant and promising antislavery 
men of the country, rather to the horror and disgust of many of 
his old associates; and some of his social relations that had been of 
the warmest and closest character were broken off. 

The wealth of Boston, its merchants and manufacturers and 
shipowners, were against him, and his success as a lawyer, which 
had been good at the start, must have been seriously interfered 
with ; but little did he care for that, for he knew he was right and 
meant to stick to it, and presently, by the very reason of his po- 
litical secession, his great opportunity came in the fugitive slave 
cases, which enabled him as a lawyer to render memorable service 
to the good of mankind. 

I think myself that when the first attempts to enforce the fugi- 
tive slave law of 1850 were made in Boston, the great majority of 
the educated people, and, indeed, of all the people of Massachusetts, 
would have preferred that the enforcement of the odious law should 
be quietly submitted to without any demonstration against it. The 
compromise measures of 1850, of which that law was a part, had 
been accepted, strangely enough, as a finality. They had been 
advocated by Mr. Webster, Mr. Clay, and Mr. Calhoun, all of them 
already old men, who had desired nothing so much as that the 
slavery question should be settled for once and forever, while they 
were still upon the political stage. They beheved that the fugitive 
slave law was practically guaranteed by the Constitution, and that 
attempts to enforce it would result in no serious harm. In this, as 
the result showed, they proved to be blind leaders of the bhnd ; but 
the people of Massachusetts generally were still inclined to follow 
their lead. But not so with Mr. Dana and Charles Sumner and 
Robert Rantoul. They appear to have recognized the binding 
force of the constitutional provision, that "no person held to serv- 
ice or labor in one State under the laws thereof, escaping into 



28 THE CAMBRIDGE HISTORICAL SOCIETY [Oct. 

another state, shall in consequence of any law or regulation therein, 
be discharged from such service or labor, but shall be delivered up 
on claim of the party to whom such service or labor may be due " ; 
but they believed also that this did not dispense with essential 
safeguards for the protection of persons involved, and especially 
that they were entitled to a trial by jury and to such other protec- 
tion as might be afforded to them by legislative provisions of the 
states which would not be in conflict with the Constitution of the 
United States. 

So when the first seizure under the odious law was made by the 
arrest of Shadrach in Boston on the 15th of February, 1851, Mr. 
Dana, having heard of it, instantly repaired to the Court House, 
and, offering his services to the fugitive, prepared and presented 
to Chief Justice Shaw a petition for a writ of habeas corpus in his 
behalf. But the learned Chief Justice was not inclined to inter- 
fere, and while Mr. Dana was considering going before another 
judge, a mob of negroes invaded the Court House and rescued the 
prisoner and enabled him to make his way to freedom. The arrest 
and the rescue and the attack upon the Court House made a tre- 
mendous sensation, and the federal authorities made strenuous 
efforts to punish somebody for the escape of the prisoner. 

Among others they made a wholly unwarranted attack upon 
Mr. Charles G. Davis, who had assisted Mr. Dana in the pro- 
posed defense of Shadrach, charging him with aiding and abet- 
ting in the escape of the fugitive slave, with which he had no 
more to do than the man in the moon; but his trial before the 
United States commissioner occupied four days, and he was ably 
defended by Mr. Dana, whose argument in his defense is a model 
of forensic eloquence, a perfect gem ; and Mr. Davis was discharged 
by the commissioner, who found no case against him. 

In the meantime, Mr. Dana and Mr. Sumner were busily em- 
ployed in drawing up laws to meet what they regarded as the 
dangers and outrages of the Fugitive Slave Bill, at the request of 
a committee of the legislature. 

On the 7th of April in the same year another fugitive slave, Sims, 
was arrested by the marshal and his posse and locked up in the 
Court House, which was guarded by a huge force of policemen, and 
a chain was stretched entirely around it, so that everyone that 



1915] DANA AS A LAWYER AND A CITIZEN 29 

entered it, including the judges of the Supreme Court and parties 
having business before that tribunal, must go under the chain. 
Mr. Rantoul and Mr. Dana appeared in the Supreme Court and 
moved again for a writ of habeas corpus, which was promptly- 
denied, the Chief Justice giving the opinion of the court refusing 
the writ. The opinion held that "the only question was whether 
the Commissioner could constitutionally act: — that the act of 1793 
gave the same powers to magistrates which this act gives to Com- 
missioners, and was acquiesced in for more than fifty years, and 
recognized, or at least was not decided to be unconstitutional by 
any court. So the court held that the point must be considered as 
settled by lapse of time, acquiescence, and recognition." And again 
Mr. Sumner and Mr. Dana went before a federal judge and made 
an ineffectual effort for release of the fugitive, and the next 
day, as Mr. Dana relates, between four and five o'clock in the 
morning "the poor fellow, with tears in his eyes, was marched on 
board a vessel, escorted by a hundred or more of the city police 
under orders of the United States marshal, armed with swords and 
pistols, and in a few minutes she sailed down the harbor." 

In connection with this case it is pleasant always to remember 
that Judge Devens, who was the marshal on the occasion and had 
such an unpleasant duty to perform, afterward, when he became 
Attorney General of the United States in 1877, employed Sims as 
a messenger in the Department of Justice, which position he held 
for several years while Devens remained in office. 

But one startling and immediate result of these two cases was the 
election, within a fortnight after the rendition of Sims, of Charles 
Sumner as United States Senator to fill the seat which Mr. Webster 
had occupied. Meanwhile Mr. Dana continued for several months 
the defense of the rescue cases, as they were called, and nobody 
that he defended was ever convicted. 

One of the most singular of these cases was that of Elizur 
Wright, the celebrated journalist and linguist. He was tried for 
complicity in the rescue of Shadrach, and as he was absolutely in- 
nocent, he refused to have any counsel, but defended himself. The 
jury disagreed, standing eleven for conviction and one for acquittal, 
but on a new trial he was acquitted, being defended this time by 
Mr. Dana, who says that Wright was entirely clear of all connection 



30 THE CAMBRIDGE HISTORICAL SOCIETY [Oct. 

"with the rescue in fact, although he was delighted with the result. 
The result of his trial, Mr. Dana says, showed the importance of 
the professional services of an advocate. 

Mr. Dana's services in the cause of freedom continued as long as 
there was any slave-hunting upon the soil of Massachusetts, and 
ended on Boston's Black Friday, the 2d of June, 1854, when 
Anthony Burns, the last fugitive slave arrested under the act, was 
consigned by Judge Loring to the custody of the marshal to be 
escorted back to slavery. 

Mr. Dana in his Diary thus describes it: "This was a day of in- 
tense excitement and deep feeling in the city, in the State, and 
throughout New England, and indeed a great part of the Union. 
The hearts of millions of persons were beating high with hope, 
or indignation, or doubt. The Mayor of Boston has ordered out 
the entire military force of the city, from 1500 to 1800 men, and 
undertaken to place full discretionary powers in the hands of 
General Edmands. These troops and the three companies of reg- 
ulars fill the streets and squares from the Court House to the 
end of the wharf where the revenue cutter Hes, in which Burns, 
if remanded, will be taken to Virginia. " 

Mr. Dana labored very hard for the acquittal of this fugitive, 
and his argument at the conclusion of the case, which occupied 
four hours in its delivery, is so incisive and convincing that but 
for his adamantine conservatism Judge Loring, the magistrate, 
who was the learned Judge of Probate and a professor in the Dane 
Law School, might well have decided in favor of freedom and dis- 
charged the prisoner. 

I have laid great stress upon the services of Mr. Dana in his 
fugitive slave cases, not only because of the intense interest in 
that exciting period of our history, but also because they placed 
him in the very front rank of his profession in Massachusetts and 
made him an exceedingly prominent figure among the public men 
of New England ; and we should, I think, have expected that his 
aspirations for public office would have been sooner gratified. 
These services of his brought him no pecuniary reward, for they 
were rendered in behalf of those who were wholly without means 
or credit, and in the case of Anthony Burns, which was the most 
important of all, he absolutely declined all pecuniary compensation. 



1915.] DANA AS A LAWlilER AND A CITIZEN 31 

1 have described these labors of Mr. Dana's as great services 
rendered not only to the State but to the Nation, because they 
aroused universal attention to the fact that the boasted compro- 
mise measures of 1850, which were designed to settle the slavery 
question forever, were not final, but a total failure; that freedom 
would not down at the bidding of Congress, even when led by the 
great statesmen of a past age. Mr. Clay and Mr. Webster both 
died in 1852, Mr. Calhoun having preceded them to the grave in 
1850. Their compromise measures were buried with them, and 
the whole question had to be fought out in blood under the lead 
of Lincoln. 

In the midst of these exciting and unrewarded professional 
labors, Mr. Dana spent three months in the summer of 1853 as 
a member of the Constitutional Convention of Massachusetts, 
of which many of the leading men of the state were members, 
and among whom, from his first appearance, although it was his 
first experience in a deliberative body, he at once came to the 
front. 

Mr. Adams very justly says that "there was no man in the 
convention who rose more rapidly, or into greater prominence as 
a debater, than did Dana." And Charles Sumner, who was also 
a member, subsequently spoke of him as "the man of by far the 
greatest legislative promise," criticising only his tendency to over- 
debate, due to excessive readiness and facility. He took an active 
part in all the serious discussions, and in that which was the most 
important of all, the judiciary question, he made a most effective 
and conclusive argument, which Mr. Choate, who the next day 
made one of the great speeches of his life in the convention on 
the same subject, declared to be "such a speech as one hears once 
in an age." He spoke in favor of the proposition that it was in- 
expedient to make any change in the appointment or tenure of 
judges. There was some popular demand that Massachusetts 
should follow the example that had then been set by many of the 
states of the Union to have her judges elected by the people in- 
stead of appointed by the governor for life or during good behavior. 
There was also a proposition that the judges should be appointed 
by the governor and council for a term of ten years. 

To both of these propositions Mr. Dana, from beginning to end. 



32 THE CAMBRIDGE HISTORICAL SOCIETY [Oct. 

made strenuous and unceasing opposition, culminating in the argu- 
ment to which I have abeady referred. 

Unfortunately, almost all the states of the Union have abandoned 
the ancient system of appointing judges for life or during good 
behavior, which has worked so admirably in England since the 
Revolution of 1688, in the United States federal system since the 
foundation of the government, and to this day remains intact in 
Massachusetts; and it is largely owing to the loyal and powerful 
exertions of such men as Mr. Dana and Mr. Choate that this com- 
monwealth owes the retention of that system, which makes its 
judiciary, to say the least, compare favorably with that of the other 
states of the Union, and puts its courts side by side in the adminis- 
tration of the common law with those of England and with the 
Supreme Court of the United States. 

If the people of Massachusetts understand their true interest 
and set a proper value upon the high-toned administration of 
justice as it prevails to this day in its courts, they will always re- 
ject all attempts from whatever quarter to make their judiciary 
elective. There is always a danger of efforts being made in that 
direction, and nothing shows more clearly the imminent character 
of that danger than the fact that in this very Constitutional Con- 
vention of 1853, the last, I believe, that has been held in Massachu- 
setts, the Constitution, as adopted and submitted to the people, pro- 
posed the appointment of judges for the term of ten years, wliich 
led to its defeat by a majority of about six thousand in a total 
popular vote of 125,000, so that to-day your people stand on this 
question as they have stood ever since the adoption of the Constitu- 
tion of 1780, and will, as I hope, stand forever. You have to-day 
an absolutely independent judiciary, as impartial as the lot of 
humanity admits, which helps to make the government of the 
commonwealth a government of laws, and not of men. 

After all these labors Mr. Dana took a holiday, and had his first 
glimpse of Europe, to which he had long looked forward with 
eager anticipation. To be sure, it only lasted for two months, but 
he saw and enjoyed and recorded everything. He was just at 
the age to make the most of it, and so thorough and constant had 
his reading been all his life about England, that he seemed to know 
it all by heart, and revelled most heartily in all the places and 



1915.] DANA AS A LA^^^ER AND A CITIZEN 33 

people with which his reading had made him so familiar. In Eng- 
lish history especially he was thoroughly versed, and he lost no 
time in his haste to visit all the great and interesting historical 
places, — Westminster Hall, the Houses of Parliament, the Inns of 
Court, Kenilworth and Warwick Castle, the Courts of Justice, 
Stonehenge and Wilton, Greenwich and the Zoo, and St. James's 
Park,— and he happily fell in with many of the leading Enghsh 
men and women of the day, whom he appreciated, and they mani- 
festly appreciated him. Nothing could possibly have been more 
to his liking, and he returned at the end of his perfect vacation 
thoroughly refreshed and renewed, to resume the daily work of 
his profession, which must have seemed to him after the supreme 
delights of the summer a little more arduous toil than ever before. 

From 1856 to 1860 was the best and richest period of his pro- 
fessional life. He had some great cases, which attracted wide 
attention, in one of which, the Dalton case, the cause eelehre of 
the time, he proved himself a match single-handed against two 
great leaders of the bar, Rufus Choate and Henry F. Durant, who 
together opposed him, and but for the twelfth dissenting juror he 
would have won the case. 

Those were the days of overwork for all eminent lawyers, for 
Mr. Choate, in summing up, talked for ten hours, taking two entire 
days of the court's time, and Mr. Dana followed and spoke for 
twelve', hours, occupying parts of three days. Fortunately for us 
to-day time is more precious, the pressure upon the courts vastly 
more intense, and the two-hour rule would be strictly applied. 

Those four years were much the hardest of Mr. Dana's life, and 
his constitution proved in the end wholly unequal to the strain; 
for at the end of them, in spite of occasional holidays and voyages, 
he completely collapsed in the midst of the argument of an excit- 
ing cause, and recalling the experience of his two years before the 
mast, he wisely concluded that nothing less than a voyage around 
the world would save him; and after a lapse of fifteen months, 
in which he made the circuit of the globe, concluding with a brief 
glimpse again of England, he returned home, once more in good 
health, to find his country in the midst of that great campaign of 
1860 which resulted in the election of Lincoln and brought on the 
Civil War. 



34 THE CAMBRIDGE HISTORICAL SOCIETY [Oct. 

Through all that anxious period he held the office of United States 
Attorney for the district of Massachusetts, a position which he 
greatly magnified by his wonderful qualifications in character and 
abilitj^ and he argued with a consummate power the prize causes 
in which the legality of the whole conduct of the government 
during the Civil War was directly challenged. Both in the Dis- 
trict court of Massachusetts and in the Supreme Court of the United 
States, where he opened, and Mr. Evarts, the companion of his 
boyhood and his lifelong friend, closed, he cleared up all the diffi- 
cult and knotty questions involved. Mr. Adams records that 
one who was present at the final hearing, after Mr. Dana had closed 
his argument, happened to encounter Judge Grier, who had retired 
to the corridor in the rear of the bench, and whose clear judicial 
mind and finely cultivated hterary taste had keenly enjoyed the 
speech; in a burst of unjudicial enthusiasm he said: "Well 
your little 'Two Years Before the Mast' has settled that question; 
there is nothing more to say about it." Judge Grier shortly af- 
terward stated the opinion of the court, affirming at almost every 
point the positions of the government, and giving the highest legal 
sanction to President Lincoln's acts. This was undoubtedly Mr. 
Dana's greatest professional achievement and the one to which he 
looked back to the end of his life with the utmost elation. 

I should be doing great injustice to Mr. Dana if I failed to 
mention the famous speech he delivered in Faneuil Hall on June 
21, 1865, at an important meeting called to consider the subject of 
the reorganization of the states lately in rebellion, and the ad- 
dress to the country which he prepared on that occasion, and which, 
like the speech, attracted wide notice. 

Mr. Dana to the end of his days justly took great pride in this 
address, in which he seems to have led the way in claiming that 
the government, having put down the rebellion by force of arms, 
and holding all the rebel states in the " grasp of war," as he called 
it, might continue its military occupation of the conquered territory 
until it could secure what it regarded as a just solution of the 
tremendous questions involved. 

He said : " We stand upon the ground of war, and we exercise 
the powers of war. I put that proposition fearlessly : The conquer- 
ing party may hold the other in the grasp of war until it has secured 



1915.] DANA AS A LAWTER AND A CITIZEN 35 

whatever it has a right to require. Having succeeded in this war, 
and holding the rebel states in our military occupation, it is our 
right and duty to secure whatever the public safety and the public 
faith require." 

But he by no means justified those portions of the measures of 
reconstruction which led for a while to the shocking negro domina- 
tion in several of the southern states, and in the same speech, and 
in the memorable address to the people of the United States, which 
was drawn by him, he did not ask that the nation should insist on 
an unconditioned universal suffrage for the freedmen, but that the 
right of suffrage should be given to them in such manner as to 
be impartial, and not based in principle upon color, but to be 
reasonably attainable by intelligence and character, putting them 
on the same ground of equality as prevails in Massachusetts, where 
the right to vote is secured alike to black men and white who can 
read and write. 

It is safe, I think, to say that if the doctrines laid down by Mr. 
Dana in this speech and address had been more closely followed, 
great mischiefs would have been avoided and the terrible task of 
reconstruction would have been made more easy. 

After the close of the war Mr. Dana resigned his office, and was 
not engaged in any more serious forensic conflicts, but he devoted 
two continuous years to his edition of Wheaton's " Elements of 
International Law," which he greatly enriched by a series of most 
learned and elaborate notes, and it may fairly be said that, until 
the outbreak of the present horrible war, this book of his, in which 
he embodied all the rich fruits of his learned and laborious life, 
was a great standard authority on the subject of which it treated, 
and was valued as such, not only in his own country, but in Eng- 
land and among the continental nations. 

At this moment international law must be admitted to be in a 
state of suspense ; at any rate when peace comes it will have to 
be restated and remade with all the changes necessitated by the 
exigencies of the war and its results. Even if it ends as we hope, 
international law cannot be taken up where it stood in August, 
1914; but Dana's notes to Wheaton's Elements will form a most 
valuable stepping-stone to its future progress, by which, as we 
hope, the permanent peace of the world will be secured. 



36 THE CAMBRIDGE HISTORICAL SOCIETY [Oct. 

Let me give you a single illustration of how international law has 
failed to deal by any possibility with the difficulties presented by 
the present war, on the single subject of aeroplanes and Zeppelins, 
which have been causing so much havoc and dismay throughout 
the world during the last twelve months. When the Emperor of 
Russia issued his call for the first peace congress he referred to the 
subject of aircraft and commended it to the study of the first 
conference^ The first conference met in 1899. They discussed 
the subject very fully, and finally concluded that the world was 
not ripe for action on their part ; but they prohibited the throwing 
of projectiles from dirigible balloons or any other aircraft for the 
period of five years, expecting that the second conference would 
meet by that time and take the subject up with better knowledge. 
Well, no conference was called until eight years, in 1907. And 
there we had a great discussion on the subject. England and Ger- 
many were of one mind, to prohibit the throwing of these projec- 
tiles. Lord Reay, one of the leading Enghsh delegates, made a 
brilliant speech in support of the proposition to prohibit, in which 
he said that two elements, the land and the sea, were enough 
for war ; that the air and the sky ought to be reserved for peace. 
And the result was that we, with consummate wisdom, as we 
thought, but with what seems to have been utter folly, renewed 
the prohibition for a period that should terminate with the adjourn- 
ment of the third Hague conference, which has never met and 
perhaps wi\i never meet. So it is all left in the air. 

Mr. Dana still cherished his lifelong ambition for high political 
office, for which he was so admirably qualified, but this ambition 
was doomed to bitter disappointment, which, however, he never 
allowed to cloud his later years, for these were always cheerful, 
happy, and devoted to good works. 

He accepted the nomination for Congress in the Essex district 
ao^ainst the notorious General Butler, with whom he maintained 
an unequal contest single-handed. He proved to be no match for 
the general in the latter's characteristic rough-and-tumble methods 
of warfare, and came out at the end of the poll with an unhappily 
small vote. But he had the satisfaction of standing for the public 
credit against the avowed champion of repudiation. 

Another visit to England and Scotland, again for health's sake, 



1915.] DANA AS A LA\V1^ER AND A CITIZEN 37 

brought him back to America to resume in a quiet way the practice 
of his profession. After his misadventure in the congressional 
election he had substantially abandoned all hope of public life, 
when suddenly, to his great surprise. President Grant in 1876 sent 
in his name to the Senate for the very office which of all others it 
would have given him the greatest pleasure to fill, and which, as I 
think, of all Americans he was then the most fit to fill and to adorn 
— the English mission. But here again he encountered obstacles 
which neither he nor the President could have expected. Politics 
of a very questionable character overwhelmed his nomination, and 
his old and doughty antagonist, with all the hostile company that 
he could muster, venomously besieged the Senate Committee on 
Foreign Affairs, to whom the nomination had been referred. The 
nomination was reported adversely as the result of a very sorry 
chapter in senatorial politics. 

Had his nomination been confirmed, Mr. Dana's appointment as 
minister to England would have been a perfectly ideal one. His 
character, his education, his sympathies, and all the associations of 
his life would have made him a most acceptable and popular repre- 
sentative of the United States in the mother country, and he in 
turn would have revelled in the duties and pleasures of the office. 
I regard his defeat as having worked a very serious loss to the 
governments and the people of both nations. 

His defeat, however, did not prevent the State Department, of 
which Mr. Evarts was then the head, from selecting Mr. Dana as 
one of the counsel of the United States Government before the 
international commission appointed to meet at Halifax to dispose 
of the fisheries questions between the two countries, where again 
he rendered most excellent service, after wliich he bade farewell 
to the profession and spent his remaining days in Europe, contem- 
plating and preparing for a new work upon international law, 
which unhappily he never lived to complete. 

I confess my inability, in the space of time allotted, to do justice 
to Mr. Dana's lofty character and to his signally noble career, which 
was guided from first to last by high principle, an indomitable 
courage, a lofty independence of spirit, and a mind always con- 
scious to itself of right. He met with many cruel disappointments, 
his aspiring dreams were not realized, but take him for all in all 



38 THE CAMBRIDGE HISTORICAL SOCIETY [Oct. 

he was a man of whom his native state and country may well be 
proud and give him a liigh place among their immortals. 

I have said nothing of his private and domestic relations, but I 
cannot refrain from quoting what Mr. Parker, his partner for many 
years, said when he heard of his death : " He was the steadiest of 
friends, the most indulgent and affectionate to those whom he once 
honored with his friendship.'* 

We may well close this celebration of the centenary of Mr. Dana's 
birth by commending the study of his pure and dignified life and 
character to the young men of coming generations ; — from first to 
last the perfect gentleman. 

Bishop Lawrence. In behalf of the Cambridge Historical 
Society may I thank you for your presence. It is appro- 
priate that this meeting should be here in honor of a citizen 
of Cambridge, an Overseer of Harvard College, and a Presi- 
dent of the Harvard Chapter of the Phi Beta Kappa. And 
in your behalf I thank the Cambridge Historical Society for 
being the means of giving us such a beautiful revelation of 
the life and character of Richard Henry Dana. 



APPENDIX 

EXHIBIT IN CONNECTION WITH THE 

DANA CENTENARY 

IN THE TREASURE ROOM OF HARVARD COLLEGE LIBRARY 

October 14-22, 1915 

Portrait of Richard Dana (1700-1772) by John Singleton Copley. 

Harvard A.B. 1718. Trial justice, leading barrister with James Otis at 
the Boston Bar; frequently presided at Faneuil Hall meetings of the Sons 
of Liberty; drafted resolutions for the Massachusetts Legislature addressed 
to the King and Parhament; took the affidavit of Andrew Oliver not to 
enforce the Stamp Act, in 1765. Great grandfather of R. H. Dana, Jr. 

The frame originally held a portrait of Governor Hutcliinson, presented 
by him to Judge Edmund Trowbridge of Cambridge. Judge Trowbridge 
being a Tory, his family, afraid of an attack by the mob or of a visit from 
the Sons of Liberty, cut out and bm-ned the portrait and put into the frame 
this portrait of Richard Dana, Trowbridge's brother-in-law. 
Original affidavit of Andrew Oliver, commissioner of the Crown, taken before 
Richard Dana in 1765, binding laimself not to enforce the Stamp Act. Haw- 
thorne's "Grandfather's Chan-" gives a description of the scene. 
Portrait of Francis Dana (1743-1811) by Walter M. Brackett, from two old 
pastels (one by Sharpies). 

Harvard A.B. 1762. Son of Liberty, on special mission to Great Britain 
just before and in the early days of the Revolution, member of the Massa- 
chusetts Legislature and Continental Congress, signer of the Articles of 
Confederation, chairman of the committee of Continental Congress on war, 
on special mission with John Adams to France and Holland, appointed min- 
ister to St. Petersburg, where he went in 1781, member of the United States 
Constitutional Convention and of the Massachusetts Convention adopting 
the same. Chief Justice of Massachusetts. Grandfather of R. H. Dana, Jr. 
Framed ink sketch copied from sketch by Jacob Bigelow of Dana house on Dana 
Hill, built in 1785 by Chief Justice Francis Dana. Burned down in 1839. 
R. H. Dana, Jr., was one of the Cambridge Volunteer Fire Department and 
was very active on the occasion. Lent by Miss E. E. Dana. 
Portrait of Richard Henry Dana (1787-1879) by William M. Hunt. 

Harvard A.B. 1808. Lawyer, member of Massachusetts Legislature, 
poet, essayist, and one of the editors of the North American Review. Father 
of R. H. Dana, Jr. 
Photograph of R. H. Dana, Sen., at the age of eighty-five. 



40 THE CMIBRIDGE HISTORICAL SOCIETY [Oct. 

Portrait of R. H. Dana, Jr. (1815-1882), by G. P. A. Healy in 1876. (Upper half 
of the face is very good, but mouth and chin are not satisfactor5%) 

Photograph of another portrait of R. H. Dana, Jr., by G. P. A. Healy, belonging 
to the estate of his daughter, Charlotte (Dana) Lyman of Chicago. 

Silhouette of R. H. Dana, Jr., in his boyhood. 

Daguerreotype of R. H. Dana, Jr., taken in 1840. 

Tliree daguerreotypes of R. H. Dana, Jr., taken in 1840, one of them with sailor 
cravat, and the others ■w^th the cravats of the time. 

Photograph standing w-ith left arm on chair, in full dress-suit, costume worn in 
addressing the Supreme Judicial Com-t, taken about 1848-1850. 

Framed photograph of R. H. Dana, Jr. (enlarged), taken in the early fifties, 
about the time of the fugitive slave cases. 

Three photographs of R. H. Dana, Jr., taken about 1870, 1872 and 1879. 

Pen and ink sketch of the brig Pilgrim by J. Hem-y Blake, taken from a large 
water color which belonged to Captain Bangs Hallett, who commanded the Pil- 
grim in 1830, now in the possession of Judge Fred C. Swift of Yarmouthport. 
Presented by J. H. Blake. 

Oil painting of the brig Pilgrim, made in 1911, by S. M. Chase, following accu- 
rately every detail of the description. The Pilgrim was built in 1825, at Med- 
ford, Mass., length 85 ft. 6 in., breadth 21 ft. 7J^ in., depth 10 ft. 9M in., 180 >^ 
tons. 

Picture of the Alert in a storm, painted by Charles H. Grant. This painting 
belonged to Captain William Dane Phelps, who commanded the Alert, 1840- 
1843. Lent by liis daughter, Mrs. Charles E. Goodwin of Lexington. 

Water color of the Alert, painted for Captain Phelps, when on the coast of Cali- 
fornia in 1840. Lent by Mrs. Goodwin. 

Oil painting of the Alert by S. M. Chase, 1911, following accurately every detail 
of the description. The Alert was built in Boston in 1828, length 113 ft. 4 in., 
breadth 28 ft., depth 14 ft., 399 tons. Builder, Noah Brooks of Boston. 

Large, fully rigged model of the Alert lent by Mrs. Henry F. Wild, Dana's daugh- 
ter. (The deck not quite correct.) 

Photograph of Captain Faucon who commanded the Alert and afterward the Pil- 
grim on the coast of California, taken in 1894 at the age of eighty-seven. Cap- 
tain Faucon was frequently favorably mentioned in "Two Years Before the 
Mast." 

Photograph of the Cliffs of San Juan Capistrano and Dana's Cove, California. 
Down these cliffs Dana risked his life to save a few hides, on the captain's call 
for a volunteer. 

Photograph of the De la Guerra house, Santa Barbara, California. 

Framed painting of the daughters of a Spanish Don in California in the early 

forties, supposed to be Doiia Anita and Doiia Angustias de la Guerra de Noriego 

y Carrillo, described in "Two Years Before the Mast." Lent by Mrs. Charles 

E. Goodwin. 

Long panoramic photograph of San Diego Bay, seen across the site of the old 

hide houses. Lent by Mrs. H. F. Wild. 
Photograph of doorway of mission at San Luis Rey, California. 



1915.] EXHIBIT — HARVARD COLLEGE LIBRARY 41 

Large wTought iron nail from hide house at San Diego, California. Lent by Mrs. 

H. F. Wild. 
Tarpaulin hat worn by R. H. Dana, Jr., while at sea. These hats were worn on 

the back of the head, the sea fashion of those days. It was sewed and covered 

by Dana. (See chapter 26 of "Two Years Before the Mast.") 
Flannel jacket and trousers cut and sewed by R. H. Dana, Jr., while at sea, as 

told in "Two Years Before the Mast." 
Some of his other sea-clothes. 
Personal log of Andrew B. Amazeen, chief mate of the Pilgrim, kept on passage 

home in the Alert, 1836. Lent by Edward C. Amazeen of Melrose. 
Seaman's papers of Andrew B. Amazeen. Lent by Edward C. Amazeen. 
Porcellian and Phi Beta Kappa medals of R. H. Dana, Jr. 
Manuscript dissertation of R. H. Dana, Jr., "Moral and Literary Character of 

Bulwer's Novels," winning the Bowdoin prize, at Harvard College, 1837. 
Harvard College catalogues in which Dana's name appeared. 
Dana's Diary (kept diuing the voyage), from which the manuscript of "Two 

Years Before the Mast" was written out. 
From the manuscript of "Two Years Before the Mast," the account of the 

flogging. 
Fugitive slave case. Brief and notes of R. H. Dana, Jr., in the trial of the negro 

Scott and others, 1851, for rescuing the slave Shadrach. 
Short brief (about the size of one's hand) being the notes from which a four hours' 

argument was made by Dana against the rendition of Anthony Burns, the fugi- 
tive slave, 1854. 
Notes taken by Mr. Dana during the trial of the same. 
Silver salver presented May 2, 1854, to R. H. Dana, Jr., by Wendell Phillips and 

others, for his defense of Anthony Burns, the fugitive slave, Mr. Dana having 

refused any compensation for his services in that or any other fugitive slave 

case. 
"Specimens of the British Poets." Presented to Mr. Dana in 1853 by a colored 

woman — "As a small token of my Respect for your untiring exertions not only 

in my cause, but in being a friend in all cases to a proscribed race. 

Respectfully 

RosANNE Taylor." 
A London edition of Hallam's works, in eight volumes, presented to Mr. Dana 

by Robert Morris, the first colored lawyer of Boston, and others of his race, 

with a grateful inscription. [This was not found in time for the exhibit.] 
Commission of R. H. Dana, Jr., as United States District Attorney, signed by 

Lincoln and Seward. 
Draft of a letter from R. H. Dana, Jr., to William M. Evarts, advising against 

the trial of Jefferson Davis for treason. Evarts and Dana had been appointed 

counsel by the government to conduct the trial in 1868, but their advice against 

the measure was accepted. 
Vertical folder case containing letters received, newspaper clippings of speeches, 

resolutions and articles prepared by R. H. Dana, Jr., arranged cloronologically. 
Six bound volumes of letters received by R. H. Dana, Jr., from 1838 to December, 

1860. 



42 THE CAMBRIDGE HISTORICAL SOCIETY [Oct. 

Letter of Mr. Lee Warner introducing to R. H. Dana, Jr., his "young friend J. 
Bryce," the present Lord Bryce. 

Letters from Lord Chancellor Cranworth, Chief Justice Campbell, and the Duke 
of Argyll, selected from letters received by R. H. Dana, Jr., while in England 
in 1856. 

Letter of Lafayette to William EUery, a signer of the Declaration, great grand- 
father of R. H. Dana, Jr. 

Proclamation of Count Rochambeau, commander of the French fleet during the 
Revolutionary War, presented to William Ellery. 

Letter from William Wordsworth, and copy of poem in hand^^Titing of Mrs. 
Wordsworth, to Washington AUston, imcle-in-law of R. H. Dana, Jr. 

Letter from Samuel Taylor Coleridge to Washington Allston, 

Editions of "Two Years Before the Mast" 

1840. New York, Harper & Bros. (Harper's Family Library, No. 106.) Bound in 
black cloth. 

The first edition, published anonymously. This copy is full of pencil notes of 
correction and suggestion by the author's father, R. H. Dana, Sen. 
The same. Bound in brown linen. 

The same edition appeared subsequently with different dates in the imprint. 

1841. London, Edward Moxon. Bound in half calf. 

An author's edition, Moxon having voluntarily paid more for the privilege 
in England than Dana got from Harper & Bros, in America, though there 
was then no international copyright. 

1854. London, G. Routledge & Co. 12th thousand. 

1869. Boston & New York, Ticknor & Fields. 

With illustration at head of first chapter. 

Other copies of the same date have imprint, Boston, Fields, Osgood & Co., 
successors to Ticknor and Fields. 

The preface to this "New edition" reads: "After twenty-eight years, the 
copyright of this book has reverted to me. In presenting the first 'author's 
edition' to the public, I have been encouraged to add an accoimt of a visit to 
the old scenes, made twenty-four years after, together with notices of the sub- 
sequent story and fate of the vessels, and of some of the persons with whom the 
the reader is made acquainted. R. H. D., Jr. Boston, May 6, 1869." 

1869. London, Sampson Low, Son & Marston. 

With frontispiece, and chapter "Twenty-four Years After." 

1871. Boston, James R. Osgood & Co., late Ticknor & Fields and Fields, Osgood & Co. 

With illustration at beginning of first chapter, and additional chapter " Twenty- 
four Years After." 

1872. The same. 

1873. The same. 
187.5. The same. 

1877. Edinburgh, Adam & Charles Black. 

With frontispiece and vignette on title page; contains glossary of sea terms 

and drawings of ships evidently taken from Dana's Seaman's Manual. 
1879. Boston, Houghton, Osgood & Co. 

Same as James R. Osgood & Co.'s editions. 
1890. New York, Worthington Co. 
1894. London, Glasgow and Dublin, Blackie & Son, Ltd. (Blackie's School and Home 

Library.) 



1915.] EXHIBIT — HARVARD COLLEGE LIBRARY 43 

1895. Boston & New York, Houghton, MiflBin & Co. 

With illustration at head of first chapter and chapter "Twenty-four Yeare 
After." 

1895. Boston & New York, Houjjhton, Mifflin & Co. 

The same as the last, but with portrait of R. H. Dana, Jr., as frontispiece (from 
daguerreotype of 1840, with sailor necktie). 
Another copy. 

Illustrated with photographs taken on the spot in California and maps in- 
serted. Handsomely bound in leather, with manuscript index. Presented 
to the widow of the author in 1896 by her nephew and niece. Full-rigged 
ship embossed on cover. 

[1895.] Boston & New York, Houghton, Mifflin & Co. (Riverside Literature Series.) 

1895. Philadelphia, Henry Altemus. 

With picture of full-rigged brig as frontispiece. Title page in red and green. 
A few wood-cut illustrations through the book. Abridged. 

1896. New York, Boston and New Orleans. University Publishing Co. Paper cover. 

Abridged for school reading with an introduction and notes. (Very much 
abridge<l.) 
1896. Boston, New York and Chicago. Houghton, Mifflin & Co. (Riverside School 
Library.) 

1899. London, Adam & Charles Black. 

With illustrated cover in colors; illustration on back and front; frontispiece 
and title page with illustrations of vessels and a glossary of sea terms; ship's 
sail and rigging evidently taken from Dana's Seaman's Manual. 

1900. New York, D. Appleton & Co. (World's Great Books Series, Aldine edition.) 

Bound in green buckram. With critical and biographical introduction by 
Charles Warren Stoddard ; with chapter " Twenty-four Years After." Portrait. 

1909. New York, P. F. Collier & Son. (Harvard classics.) 

With introduction, notes and illustrations; photograph from portrait by Miss 
Pertz opposite title page. 

1909. New York, Macmillan Co. (Pocket American & English Classics.) 

Frontispiece portrait and autograph. School edition with glossary. With in- 
troduction and notes by Homer Eaton Keyes. 

1911. New York, Macmillan Co. 

With introduction by Sir Wilfred Grenfell and illustrations by Charles Pears. 
Handsome edition with colored illustrations and good type. 

1911. Boston, Houghton, Mifflin & Co. 

With a supplement by the author, and introduction and additional chapter 
entitled "Seventy-six Years After," by his son. Indexed; appendix with 
information regarding the vessels, their crews and officers. Colored illustra- 
tions by E. Boyd Smith. Front cover illustration from S. M. Chase's pic- 
ture of the Alert (colored). Charts of the voyage and of the coast of Cali- 
fornia on fly-leaves at the beginning and end of book. 
The same in two volumes. Bound in canvas. 

Edition de luxe, with many additional drawings and sketches, etc. Limited 
edition, large paper. 

Undated Editions 

Philadelphia, Henry Altemus. 

With frontispiece portrait marked Richard H. Dana, Jr., but in reality a pic- 
ture of his father. Somewhat abridged. A picture of the brig was substituted 
as frontispiece in a later edition. 



44 THE CAMBRIDGE HISTORICAL SOCIETY [Oct. 

New York, Hearst & Co. 

Illustrated cover back and front. 
New York, F. M. Lupton Publishing Co. Green paper cover. 
New York, A. L. Burt. 

Full-page illustration of a barkentine opposite title page. 
New York, Merrill & Baker. (The Levant edition.) 

Full-page illustration of fishing boat hailing ship in fog opposite title page. 

Title page in red and black. 
New York, John W. Lovell Co. 

Date of purchase, December, 1889. 
New York, Lovel, Coryell & Co. 
New York, American Publishers' Corporation. 
London, New York and Melbourne, Ward, Lock & Co. 

Frontispiece a full-page illustration of the brig. 
London, J. M. Dent & Sons; New York, E. P. Dutton & Co. (Everyman's 

Library, edited by Ernest Rhys.) 
London, Milner & Sowerby. 

With frontispiece of brig and irrelevant picture on title page. With additions 

and appendix not by the author. 
London, Frederick Warne & Co. Paper cover. 

Includes a glossary of sea terms. 
London, T. Nelson & Sons. (Sixpenny Classics.) 

Photogravure of brig before the wind with full sail set. Much abridged. This 

copy bought in Glasgow, 1913. 
The same. 

With wrapper marked " Price in France 1 fr." This copy from Paris, 1915. 

In the Congressional Library there is a Dutch translation printed in Holland, 

In a catalogue of foreign books is advertised a German translation, e\'idently 

taken from Harper's anonymous edition, but attributed to James Fenimore 

Cooper, and a French translation, anonymous. 

Fifty-four editions or more, issued by thirty-two different publishers, are 

known. 

Editions of "The Seaman^ s Friend" 

The Seaman's Friend; containing a treatise on practical seamanship, with 

plates; a dictionary of sea terms; customs and usages of the merchant service; 

laws relating to the practical duties of master and mariners. 
1841. Boston, Charles C. Little & James Brown and Benjamin Loring & Co.; New 

York, Dayton & Saxton, and E. & G. W. Blunt; Philadelphia, Carey & Hart. 
1847. Boston, Thomas Groom & Co. 5th edition. 

Interleaved, with a few notes by the author. 
18,51. Boston, Thomas Groom & Co. 6th edition, revised and corrected. 
1854. Boston, Thomas Groom & Co. 7th edition. 

An 8th edition was issued in 1856, and a 9th in 1857. 
1861. Dana's Seamen's Friend. New edition revised and corrected; and with notes 

by James Lees. London & Liverpool, George Philip & Son. 
1871. The Seaman's Manual. r2th edition, revised and corrected in accordance A\nth 

the most recent acts of Parliament. By John J. Mayo, registrar general of 

shipping and seamen. London, E. Moxon, Son & Co 



1915.] EXHIBIT — HARVARD COLLEGE LIBRARY 45 

Editions of " To Cuba and Back. A Vacation Voyage" 

1859. Boston. Ticknor & Fields. 

Two copies, one a presentation copy, "Sarah W. Dana, from her husband, 
the author. May 20, 1S59." One, with autograph of author. 
1859. London. Smith, Elder & Co. 
1887. Boston, Houghton, Mifflin & Co. Fourteenth edition. 

Wheaton's Elements of International Law. Eighth edition. Edited, with 
notes, by R. H. Dana, Jr. Boston, Little, Brown and Company, 1866. 

Presentation on fly leaf to Edmund T. Dana, brother of the author in the 
author's handwriting. 
Reprint of Richard Henry Dana's Note (215) to Wheaton's International Law, 
illustrating the rights of law as to neutrals, printed by the executive department 
for the use of the agents and attorneys of the United States at the arbitration 
at Geneva, with a letter from J. C. Bancroft Davis, Department of State, Wash- 
ington, August 3, 1871. 



A full collection of arguments, reports, and articles in magazines and in pam- 
phlet form including Lexington Centennial oration; the Old South argument; the 
defense of Rev. I. S. Kallock; the argument in the Dalton divorce case; tribute 
to Judge Sprague; address on Edward Everett; argument against the proposed 
removal of Judge Loring; speech at Manchester, N. H., just before the opening 
of the Civil War; Faneuil Hall address on the question of reconstruction; 
Enemy's territory and alien enemies; trial of Rev. O. S. Fresco tt; the Bible 
in schools; usury laws and several reprints; argument before the Halifax 
Fisheries Commission; argument in the Amy Warwick prize cause; defense of 
Charles G. Davis charged with attempt to rescue fugitive slave; argument 
against the incorporation of the town of Belmont; argument on the judiciary; 
report of Overseers; article on Francis Dana, grandfather of R. H. Dana, Jr.; 
on the discovery of ether; argument in defense of Anthony Burns; speech on 
the reorganization of the rebel states, June 21, 1S65; voyage on the Grand 
Canal, Atlantic Monthly, May, 1891; Allston and his unfinished picture, At- 
lantic Monthly, 1889; On Leonard Woods, Scribner's Monthly, November, 
1880; sketch of American diplomacy, Scribner's Monthly, August, 1880; how 
we met John Brown, Atlantic Monthly, 1871. 

Richard Henry Dana, Jr. Speeches in Stirring Times and Letters to a Son, 
edited with introductory sketch, a bibliography and notes by Richard H. Dana, 
3d. Boston and New York, Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1910. 

With a bill of sale of slaves inserted. 

Richard Henry Dana. A Biography: By Charles Francis Adams. Boston, 
Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1890. 2 vols. 
A later revised edition of the same. 



% 






n / 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 



015 



775 625 4 4 




W 




